grabbed him and shoved him out the door. When Williams reached the booth, the d.j. shouted over the loudspeakers, "Hey; everybody; the Trackboyz are in the house!" and started to play "Tipsy:" As people piled onto the dance floor, Williams stepped out of the booth. He looked tired. He had been making pro- motional stops at dance halls all night, and before the evening was over he had to hit the strip clubs, for good measure. T hroughout the late fall and early winter, "Tipsy" rose toward the top of the charts. It started by gaining popularity in a number of scattered urban markets-Las Vegas, Oakland, Miami-where it received substantial airtime on the major hip-hop stations. Sherita SatÙsberry; the programming di- rector at KVEG, in Las Vegas, said that it was played often at the station's club events. "There are songs where people will leave the dance floor; there are songs where people will get up and dance; and then there are songs like 'Tipsy;' where the entire dance floor gets packed and the whole energy of the club changes because of the song," she told me. By January 17th, the song had broken onto the Billboard Hot 100, at No. 96. A month later, it had climbed to No. 22. Around that time, I got a call from J er- emy Geffen. "This song is taking off like a rocket ship!" he said. In February, I went to Los Angeles to visit the Trackboyz, who were finish- ing the final mixes onJ-Kwon's album, with Manny Marroquin, the sound en- gineer. They were staying at a hotel in Beverly Hills, and we met in their room to watch the recendy completed video for "Tipsy:" In the video, J - Kwon throws a giant houseparty and dances with a lot of foxy older women. (Jer- maine Dupri makes a cameo, as a pizza delivery boy:) The Trackboyz seemed pleased. "I like it because the focus is on J-Kwon," Williams said. He and Kent also showed me pictures of five new vans and trucks that had been ordered to shuttle J - Kwon around the country while he promotes the album; each was plastered with photographs ofJ-Kwon. "His picture needs to be bigger on the back," Williams said. "But I am cool with the vans." Later that night, the Trackboyz went to Marroquin's studio, in North Holly- 36 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2004 wood, to mix "IC IC," the last song on J - Kwon's album. They presented Marro- quin with a portable hard drive contain- ing roughly fifty tracks, which encom- passed all the sounds on "IC IC"-snare drums, bass, guitar, vocals, the clapping of hands, the stomping of boots. Mar- roquin downloaded them into his com- puter, which sent them over to a long mixing board, where each track had its own set of controls, for volume, treble, and bass. For the next several hours, they made subde adjustments to individual sounds, turning down the treble on a grunting noise, or adding reverb to a boot stomp, or adjusting the volume of J - Kwon's voice during a partictÙar verse. It was after midnight when the song was finished. Marroquin played it one more time. We listened to a mid-tempo beat in which a distorted bass and chants of echo, ho, ho" were offset by hypnotic bells; all the while, J - Kwon bragged of his many exploits as a pimp-an act that requires some imagination for someone only four years past pube There were guest appearances from, among others, several of the St. Lunatics: Nelly; Mur- phy Lee, and a rapper named Ali. The lone female voice-throaty and tough- belonged to a little-known rapper named Ebony Eyes. When I asked about her, Williams explained that she was a twenty-three- year-old from South St. Louis who helped support her four younger sisters by telemarketing and shining shoes. "She is our main focus right now," he said. "Here, listen to this." He played "I Can Act Like a Bitch," a rapid-fire song that warns of the dangers of trifling with her. The beat was faster and slighrly less abrasive than the J-Kwon tracks. When the song was over, Williams said that the record labels were alreadyask- ing about her. "We're going to do the same thing with Ebony that we did with J K " h . d " Sh ' " - won, e SaI. e s our next star. . CONSTABULARY NOTES FROM ALL OVER From the Fort Atkinson (Wis.) Daily] effer- son County Union. Police responded to a residence in the 400 block of Jefferson Street after a man reported that his hat had been burned. The man stated that while he was sleeping, his roommate started the hat he was wearing on fire to wake him up "because he was bored." The roommate agreed to buy the com- plainant a new hat in the morning. .':; adv. rtisemènt I \-,') ...... ,.. 1< ' ,' The New Yorker Promotion Department invites you to look for these releases. bookmarks ' );,; NI A c. GJhe ' ]\}, Ç:" .- "c'- - ,,- " "'\,', 0 ' " :>, " '" 0" S8 ^," ^ '<--<'} i( ... .: '. . . . '" . "-c-' , . .. This fresh, jazzy new edition of Mother Goose rhymes includes well-loved classics and lesser-known gems. A Greenwillow Book ,D';l1:SSlHE , , .B;IIi Holid. "" \ldmf Hcnod.r .: ""' . '."'-Jen:y Þ;ll.h fQ' ," .' .". . '. -:-. ,":--:> : ) .;. ". '-";' "'-,..' ;".- . '.. . '\...... 'Ie>- ",.. . ' .v..... \ ,':0: . ' ':':c " -..i ". _ ; . .) l ' j:<.. -<' . , ' , Wt'.t:c:.n , ' IN.$U);Et ', ....J', , - , ,'" . From award-winning' illustrator Jerry Pinkney comes this illustrated edition of Billie Holiday's famous song $'God Bless the Child," which includes a CD with the song performed by Billie Holiday. Amistad 1()-' A\!v . FR:;-,\>;1}' .s"'r:c;.... E'-IT! " :øÍ 'i' , 4- r. J ),,!: \ . r ' .- , (':" EP ð p # " Where 1k Ends the poems and dt'8W1øg5 of She1 Silverstein Now in a 30th Anniversary Special Edition, Shel Silverstein's beloved collection of poems and drawings includes 12 never -before-published poems. . HarperCollinsPublishers www;harpct'col1ins:co m